In a recent football matchup between the University of Minnesota and Ohio State, two other tough rivals are set to face each other: John McCain and Barack Obama.The Gopher-Buckeye showdown is airing on Big Ten Network, where the two candidates are regular advertisers. With a main footprint that reaches seven political battleground states, Big Ten is one of several regional sports networks that have been attracting more political ads as the campaigns jockey to reach swing voters.
As the Boston Red Sox battle their baseball rivals at Fenway Park, presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama are battling each other in advertising on the New England Sports Network.
Fans of baseball's Philadelphia Phillies are seeing the Democratic and Republican nominees on Comcast SportsNet Philadelphia. On Fox Sports Florida, the Tampa Bay Rays' race to their first American League East pennant is being brought to you, in part, by Sens. Obama and McCain.
"It's a great concentration, a great way to buy men," says Brad Mont, president of political-ad-time buyer Media Ad Ventures Inc., which has placed ads for the McCain campaign. Although the ads on regional-sports networks rarely mention sports, they project "a local involvement, and some people will interpret that as supporting the team, which doesn't hurt," Mr. Mont says.
In the Big Ten, where home-team loyalty is practiced with cultlike fervor, that effect is multiplied by the electoral stakes. Since Sept. 1, Big Ten Network, which is available in 22 million homes within the Big Ten states, has been responsible for approximately 20% of the political ads Fox Sports Net says it has sold on more than a dozen regional sports networks.
"It's an attractive demographic -- in this case it's both a sports niche and a regional niche," says Charles Franklin, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and co-director of the new Big Ten Battleground Poll. Although the poll isn't directly connected with the network, its first batch of results was announced last week in a 90-minute program on the channel's air.
"It's a fortunate accident of political geography that so many of the eight states that happen to be in the Big Ten are competitive states in the election," Mr. Franklin says, adding "it's probably not that our football teams caused us to be competitive in politics." The seven states thought to be in contention are Ohio, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Indiana; the exception is Sen. Obama's home state of Illinois.
The amounts the campaigns are spending on regional sports networks are still tiny when compared with the hundreds of millions of dollars being dedicated to TV advertising across the board. It's likely regional sports networks have pulled in well under $10 million in election ads, according to estimates from people familiar with their political sales.
Nevertheless, regional sports networks offer unusually ardent audiences. Their viewers usually watch live so they don't zap commercials. Most of them are men, a difficult demographic for any marketer to reach. And they may be swing voters, too. More viewers of Fox Sports Net, for instance, are "middle of the road" politically compared with most other cable networks, according to Mediamark Research & Intelligence.
"I've been doing this a long time, and this is the first time I've seen political spending really gravitate toward the regional sports network sector," says John McGuinness, senior vice president and general sales manager of the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network. Both campaigns have been buying ads during Washington Nationals and Baltimore Orioles games, Mr. McGuinness says, because his network's footprint includes the battleground state of Virginia.
Fox Sports Net, which owns 16 regional sports networks and handles national sales for 19 others, hasn't traditionally pursued political advertising, according to Kyle Sherman, who heads its ad sales. But this year, he specifically sought out political media buyers to offer multistate buys. The group even split its feed for Fox Sports Arizona to allow the campaigns to buy Arizona Diamondbacks ads that air only in New Mexico -- allowing both campaigns to sidestep Sen. McCain's home state of Arizona, which is solidly Republican.
Representatives of Sens. Obama and McCain declined to discuss the specifics of their ad strategies. "We are making sure voters see our ads in many creative ways and places," Obama campaign spokesman Nick Shapiro wrote in an email, saying they are only one part of a "voter outreach strategy" that includes online organizing and "neighbors talking to neighbors." McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds said, "We believe that our candidate's fanaticism for baseball, boxing, football, as a lifelong sports fan, positions us uniquely to court American voters that are also sports fans."
With baseball's regular season ending this weekend -- and baseball games heading to national TV -- some regional sports nets are looking to hockey and basketball to draw political dollars. Altitude Sports & Entertainment -- the network of Denver Nuggets and Colorado Avalanche owner Stan Kroenke -- is actively pursuing political ads now that Colorado is a battleground, says Tom Philand, head of sales and marketing: "We'd love to be able to tap into some of that spending."
By: Same Schechner
Wall Street Journal; September 24, 2008
